Edward C. Banfield (1916-99), the conservative political scientist who spent most of his career at Harvard University, was one of the most eminent and controversial scholars of the twentieth century. His best-known work, The Unheavenly City (1970), was a deeply informed but unsparing criticism of Great Society-era attempts to alleviate urban poverty. His New York Times obituary observed that Banfield “was a critic of almost every mainstream liberal idea in domestic policy,” who argued that “at best government programs would fail because they aimed at the wrong problems; at worst, they would make the problems worse.” In many respects, he was one of the first neoconservatives.
Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has studied Banfield’s writings closely. (He is also married to one of Banfield’s granddaughters.) He was the force behind the recent republication of Banfield’s first book, Government Project (1951), which had been out of print for decades. Government Project is about a New Deal plan to help destitute agricultural workers during the Depression by resettling them on a newly constructed cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona. The Casa Grande Valley Farms, as the project was known, recruited some sixty families to live there and provided them with land and a government-created community complete with new homes, roads, and farm buildings. For a few years, the cooperative farm flourished, but ultimately it failed because the residents, unable to establish mutual trust, could not cooperate.
In this podcast discussion, Kosar describes how Banfield’s study of Casa Grande made him begin to doubt the efficacy of government planning, and eventually turned him from a committed New Dealer to a skeptic of government’s ability to induce people to cooperate. This skepticism was strengthened by his subsequent study of village life in southern Italy — the basis for his 1958 classic The Moral Basis of a Backward Society — where he found that the inhabitants’ distrust of anyone outside their immediate family made collective governance all but impossible. Kosar also describes Banfield’s work on highly cooperative Mormon communities in southern Utah, Democratic machine politics in Chicago and other large American cities, and the shortcomings of urban programs such as the War on Poverty. Kosar concludes that Banfield came to believe that problems like crime or poverty ultimately were “the output of individual behaviors — and that means fixing those problems means changing the individual. And he was just very skeptical that a government program could change an individual.”
Transcript
Kevin Kosar: If you had asked Banfield, “Can government build a bridge?” He would say yes, they could do it quite well. But when it comes to something more complicated, like how do you ameliorate or eliminate poverty? That’s a whole different ball of wax. And government’s ability to do that, I think we’ve seen over time, has been very hit or miss.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Kevin Kosar. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his research interests include the U.S. Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, K-12 education, and the U.S. Postal Service. He’s also the host of the Understanding Congress podcast. Prior to joining AEI, he held several offices at the R Street Institute, where he co-founded the Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group, a transpartisan project to strengthen the legislative branch.
And prior to that, he spent more than a decade working for the Congressional Research Service as well as teaching public policy at New York University and public administration at Metropolitan College of New York. He’s the author of numerous books, including 2020’s Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform, which he co-authored with Lee Drutman and Timothy LaPira. And you can find more of his writings at the Kosar on Congress and Governance Substack, as well as his new Beverages, Books, and More Substack. Welcome, Kevin!
Kevin Kosar: Geoff, thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would be severely remiss also if I failed to mention that you are the author of Whiskey: A Global History and Moonshine: A Global History. So how did you come by this sideline expertise in the firewater?
Kevin Kosar: It’s a story of how to turn a vice into a virtue. I grew up in Ohio, and at that time it was a place where almost everybody drank thin yellow beer — yellow water that came in cans. That was our go-to beverage. And I had the good fortune of getting a job as a bartender at the faculty club at the Ohio State University. My boss told me that we had sophisticated clientele and that if I wanted to be able to properly serve them, I needed to taste everything behind the bar and take notes on it.
And thus began my drinks education that ran along with my education proper in both undergraduate and then off to NYU in grad school, where I just kept the habit up. I was writing for a bar newspaper on the side while I was chasing my Ph.D., and ultimately ended up launching the website AlcoholReviews.com in 1998. I briefly flirted with quitting grad school and taking it pro, because there were people in New York City who were willing to raise half a million dollars in seed money to fund the drink site and to take it big. But I’ve always kept it as a hobby, and it has served me well. It has gotten me plenty of free beverages, and it’s also helped me bear up as I study these nettlesome things in the realm of governance and politics.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s a very sanity-inducing sideline, Kevin. Before we get into this discussion, there’s a lot of aspects of your work that I would like to talk about, but on this occasion at least, we’re going to be discussing a book that you recently caused to be reissued after a lapse of many decades when it was out of publication. I’m referring to Government Project by the late eminent conservative political scientist, Edward C. Banfield, which was recently republished by AEI Press with a foreword by yourself. But before we get into that whole subject of Banfield, however, I’d like to ask you something about your work at AEI. You’re a senior fellow in the Legal and Constitutional Studies division or department at AEI, and other senior fellows include my previous podcast guest Phil Wallach, hoped-for future podcast guest Yuval Levin (who also directs the program), along with a number of well-known non-resident senior fellows including Jay Cost, Robert George, and John Yoo. What does it seem to you is the overall mission and ideological perspective of this project, if I can put it that way?
Kevin Kosar: Well, Yuval has built a big department — big in issue coverage. I believe the full name of it is Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies, so I’m not sure entirely what that excludes. But yes, we have political philosophers in our department. We have Ben and Jenna Story, who formerly taught at Furman, who study and teach the Great Books. We have Joshua Katz, the philologist, who used to be at Princeton; he’s writing the stories on higher education. I think the basic idea is that we’re a constitutional republic, but the health of the republic is not simply a government scheme; it’s built into a larger context. And higher ed (and the people it produces) affect our governance system, certainly, as do many other things. And so it’s a very broad tent, in which to have broad cross-specialty conversations about the well-being of the country, the nature of the regime, and prospects for reform.
Geoff Kabaservice: AEI has moved into a new office building and has also tooled up in terms of some of its hiring lately, including yourself. I wonder how you would characterize AEI at this moment in its political or ideological evolution?
Kevin Kosar: We’re certainly conservative. There’s no litmus test. We’re not a think tank that adopts single viewpoints on particular issues. But it’s fair to say that just about everyone there you’re going to find is in some respect conservative. I mean, for example, we hired Ruy Teixeira, who identifies as a Democrat — and often a social democrat. But the things his polling work, in his study of voters, is saying are often things that conservatives are saying and pointing out; so too his criticisms of wokeness and certain other stuff. So everybody there is conservative in one way or another, but it’s certainly not a monochrome. And there’s certainly plenty of disagreement amongst us, which makes it lively and fun.
Geoff Kabaservice: Of course, the meaning of conservatism is greatly contested nowadays. So I guess I would ask how does AEI generally or you personally relate to the whole specter of populist conservatism, particularly as epitomized by Donald Trump?
Kevin Kosar: There on the one hand can be a great deal of common sense and wisdom in the common man, and I think AEI is very attuned to that. Yet at the same time, common sense is really not enough to govern. Common sense should feed into that. But if common sense translates into just providing simplistic solutions to complex problems, well, that’s not okay; certainly Edward C. Banfield would say that’s not okay. And so it’s hitting that right balance where you can blend expertise with common sense.
I mean, it’s the nature of what an elected official really should be. In one sense, you are a representative of those who are voters, but on the other hand, you’re a trustee. You hold a public role and it’s your responsibility to do what’s best, even if the populist winds may be blowing in a different direction at the moment. This is a complex balancing act that certainly our American founders were very well attuned to. They were very concerned about the kind of mobocracy that can rise up and the popular passions of a majority that would stumble over the rights and liberties of a minority.
Geoff Kabasevice: That’s a good and diplomatic answer. Kevin, as you know, I always ask people who come on this podcast to tell me something about themselves personally. So can you tell me about where you grew up and how you came to be interested in the subjects and issues that you study now?
Kevin Kosar: Well, I grew up in Ohio, and I had never had aspirations to be a civics guru or whatever you may peg me as. I went to public schools, enjoyed the usual kids’ sort of stuff in the ‘70s and ‘80s. One thing I had going for me was a mother who was very adamant about doing well in school. She was kind of an FDR Democrat, so on the one hand, she believed in government’s ability to get things done. But she also had a real common sense, so she was not much for the kind of far-left hysterias. She was a local journalist. She later went to work as a public information officer for county government. She was active in the state’s Democratic Party.
And so I was kind of along for the ride for a lot of that. Plus we also had the habit that she and I would watch the 6:30 evening news. It started with Cronkite, and later it was Dan Rather and those other cats. We always had copies of Newsweek and US News & World Report laying around the place. And we’d have conversations. And I think that was just kind of building in the back of my head. I didn’t even plan to go to college, but she pretty much said, “Look, pick one. You can go to Akron University, which is near us, or you can go to Kent State University, which is near us. But you are going to college, boy.” And you can’t argue with Mom. And so I went, and then things just started to click.
Geoff Kabaservice: What would your destiny have been otherwise, do you think, if you hadn’t gone to college?
Kevin Kosar: Well, I could have ended up in upper management at a grocery store. It was one of the jobs I held during high school, and I quite enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting, and they seemed to think I was potential management material. When you’re growing up and getting by on $4.30 an hour, which was the minimum wage at the time, and driving a beat-up car, somebody who’s going to dangle a job for you for $32,000 — a salary no less — that would feel like all the money in the world. So it’s entirely possible I could have just ended up going that route.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have come to DC to do the work you do now, but you haven’t “gone Washington,” if I can put it that way. And in fact you still have a foothold in the Midwest?
Kevin Kosar: Yeah. I developed a habit of coming back to Ohio each year in the summertime when my kids get out of school. It’s a place where kids can be free-range. Also, monthly expenses are much lower here — the cost of groceries and just about everything else. And the whole vibe of being back here — being amongst family, friends, and just this kind of town of 40,000 people and the way they look at the world — it’s a good counterbalance to the Washington, DC bubble.
Geoff Kabaservice: How does that help your political analysis?
Kevin Kosar: It helps keep me real about the level of public interest in particular issues. It’s very common in DC for people to be running around with their hair on fire about particular topics, and it’s with good reason. But they often assume that the whole of the country cares, and in fact, the whole of the country probably doesn’t even know it’s an issue. They’ve got other things to deal with, things that are more proximate in their lives. And coming back here and being amongst these people, and having these conversations, it kind of grounds me to that fact. But it also reinforces my old-fogy belief that if you are in Washington, DC and you are involved in governance, you have a responsibility to the rest of the country, and you have to do things that are in the greater community’s interest.
Geoff Kabaservice: When you return to Ohio, you are often to be found in the company of fish. And as I was looking at some of your pictures on social media, I could not help but think of the famous quote by Herbert Hoover, who wrote that “Fishing is a chance to wash one’s soul with pure air, with the rush of the brook, or with the shimmer of the sun on the blue water. … It is discipline in the equality of man — for all men are equal before fish.” Is there anything conservative about the practice of fishing, do you suppose?
Kevin Kosar: I would imagine so. You’re going out there, and whether you catch a fish or not is entirely upon you. You can’t point to the person next to you and say, “Well, it’s your fault I’m not catching fish.” You can wave your fist at the sky and complain to God, but I don’t think he’ll take much account of this. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, it is all individual self-reliance, and what you get is based upon your skill level and also a certain amount of luck. And I think the role of luck and chance in life is something that conservatives often speak of — at least if they’re wise ones they should.
Geoff Kabaservice: So let’s talk about Edward C. Banfield, who was born in 1916 and died in 1999 at the age of 83. If listeners have never heard of Banfield, that was partly his design, because he had no interest in fame or publicity. There’s a marvelous appreciation of Banfield by his former student, James Q. Wilson, which notes that the publishers of Who’s Who once wrote to Banfield to tell him that he would be included in their next edition. And he wrote back that he didn’t want to be included, and that if they did print a sketch of him that he would sue them. But the New York Times did nonetheless print an obituary for him when he died, commenting that he was a longtime professor at Harvard University, one of the intellectual leaders of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies at the peak of the urban crisis of the 1960s and ‘70s, “whose work on urban policy and the causes of poverty gave him a reputation as a brilliant maverick.”
The obituary goes on to note that “His books and articles had a sharp contrarian edge. He was a critic of almost every mainstream liberal idea in domestic policy, especially the use of Federal aid to help relieve urban poverty. Mr. Banfield argued that at best government programs would fail because they aimed at the wrong problems; at worst, they would make the problems worse.” The obituary further notes that one of his most famous works was the 1970 book on urban problems, entitled The Unheavenly City, which drew sharp accusations of racism and “blaming the victim” from the left.
Banfield “recognized the existence and harm of racism,” according to the Times, “but propounded the view that economic class and not race was the essential ingredient in poverty.” In The Unheavenly City, Banfield “constructed a sociological portrait of what he called ‘the lower-class individual’ as someone who was very different from the middle-class professionals who sought ways to solve his problems. ‘The lower-class individual lives moment to moment,’ he wrote. ‘Impulse governs his behavior either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident.’” And the Times concluded that the fact that Banfield was an adviser in various capacities to the Nixon and Reagan administrations “gave his published views an extra measure of controversy.” Well now, tell me how you came to be interested in Banfield.
Kevin Kosar: It was happenstance. It was the blessing of having good dissertation advisors. My dissertation was devoted to the congressional politics of K-12 education policy, and a lot of that policymaking got started in the early ‘60s when there was a growing concern about poverty and cultural deprivation, et cetera. And so I drank deeply from that literature, which was being produced by lots of left-leaning academics, and it was certainly affecting my perspective in certain ways. One of my dissertation advisors said, “You’re doing a good job, but you should pick up Edward C. Banfield’s The Unheavenly City.” Essentially, he said, “It may cause you to rethink your priors a bit.” And so I found a used copy of it, started reading it on the subway, and I found myself often wanting to throw it across the subway car because it was extremely lucid, rigorous, matter-of-fact in tone, and frustrating — because I couldn’t figure out why he was wrong.
He was forcing me to think harder about education. For example, he said, there’s some sense in reconsidering policies so that we let sixteen-year-olds who are not good at school, who don’t want to be at school, to leave school rather than to bemoan a dropout epidemic and to try to figure out ways to keep them there. He said that’s creating a bad dynamic. The students don’t want to be there. They’re not really able to get through high school. The teachers feel the pressure to lower standards to just pass them along. It stresses everybody out. Why don’t you just create programs or find a way to shunt them towards a trade or something that would be useful to them? And that was just mind-blowing to me, because I was deeply worried about the dropout crisis that existed even then when I was studying; it was still a thing.
So yeah, Banfield checked my priors in a lot of ways, and I found him frustrating and fascinating. And funny enough, as fate would have it, I started dating a gal around the time I was reading the book. She asked me what I was reading, and I mentioned it to her. And she said, “Oh yeah, that’s my grandpa.” My jaw nearly dropped and ricocheted off the floor. Yes, Edward C. Banfield’s eldest daughter’s daughter, I inadvertently ended up with her, dating her and then later marrying her.
Geoff Kabaservice: Wow, that’s quite something. Does your wife have significant memories of her grandfather?
Kevin Kosar: Yes. She remembers him being a contrarian around the dinner table. When she was speaking of which college she might go to, her parents, particularly her father, had views. Her grandfather was like, “Whatever college this girl goes to, she’s going to get an education because she wants to learn. Don’t get hung up on going to the fancy places” — which was not exactly what her parents necessarily wanted to hear, but that was Ed for you. He understood that the ability to learn things was largely about the pupil, not the teacher. And he also tossed out ideas… He could see back then that there was becoming a competitive race to get into colleges, and students were doing more and more of their high school career preparing to elbow somebody else out of that spot, whether it was test prep or whatever. And he suggested that we should just start drawing by lots. You get whatever kids assigned to you, and we can just quit playing this game, which he didn’t think was a healthy form of competition between the schools.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was reading through his revised version of The Unheavenly City, where he’s actually talking about congestion pricing in New York City and says it would be a great idea if you were really worried about such things. However, probably the politician who tried to actually do it would shy away from it because they’d be afraid of whatever kind of political blowback would come. And lo and behold, Katy Hochul just declared that congestion pricing will not go through in New York City. So Banfield was kind of a prophet that way too.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes. That is one of the themes that runs throughout his work. He says, “Yes, there are some problems that are problems and they can in fact be solved. But more than likely, we’re just not going to want to do it because of our existing cultural and political beliefs and other factors. And so yes, a rational solution exists, but we won’t do it.” And that’s part of his slightly jaundiced but just very realistic view of human beings and their capacity to engage in collective action.
Geoff Kabaservice: Banfield had a number of quite famous students including Christopher DeMuth, who was the longtime head of AEI, but especially James Q. Wilson, who became one of the most famous social scientists of our time. And you could kind of tell in this essay that Wilson wrote about Banfield that he’s looking for the origins of that no-nonsense, pragmatic, practical sense of Banfield. And he found some of it, he thought, in the circumstances of his birth. He was born to a not-very-well-off family in Bloomfield, Connecticut, which is now a suburb of Hartford but was then more rural and self-contained. Banfield’s father worked in a factory in the city, but the family spent much of their time on a small farm in Bloomfield. And Banfield attended what was then called Connecticut State College, which is now the University of Connecticut. He had intended to study animal husbandry, but he ended up as an English major.
While he was an undergraduate, he met and then married Laura Fasano, who became an important intellectual collaborator of his. During the Depression, they moved repeatedly from job to job and state to state. Banfield ended up working for the federal government, first in the Department of Agriculture’s Northeast Timber Salvage Administration and then in the Farm Security Administration, which was an important New Deal agency that replaced the short-lived Resettlement Administration. He came to the attention of Rexford Tugwell, who was a key member of FDR’s Brain Trust, which led to an invitation to become a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where Tugwell was going to head a new program in planning. We’ll return to the lessons Banfield derived from his time in government. But tell me first, what was the impact of Chicago on Banfield’s thinking?
Kevin Kosar: It introduced him to rigorous academic ways of looking at topics. So, for example, one of the people he met there was Professor Frank Knight, who did a lot of teaching and thinking and writing about risk and how humans treat it and react to it. He met Chicago’s eminent sociologists. They were the sort of people who very much believed that if you wanted to understand folks that you had to get out and penetrate into their realm of what we’d call “intersubjective meanings.” You have to get in there and realize that they have different markers for things like status, different things that they consider within the bounds of acceptable behavior versus not within, and that you really can’t deal with these people unless you go out and get that sort of knowledge. So there were some wonderful books written by sociologists like William Foote Whyte on Street Corner Society and things like that, which Banfield was around.
He met Leo Strauss, so he got steeped in Straussian political theory, which was not something he much knew about. He met Milton Friedman. It was just a gathering of some really remarkable minds, each cut from their own cloth that Ed was able to work with and interchange with. And you could see it in his work. You could never pigeonhole him as being a prisoner of one type of methodology or another. And his earliest work is very heavily influenced by the sociologists who, as I said, believed that you’ve got to get out there and talk with people and study them firsthand, study the facts on the ground, to really understand what’s going on.
Geoff Kabaservice: I remember reading about Knight in Jennifer Burns’ magisterial biography of Milton Friedman. But I understand that Banfield wasn’t drawn into that circle of free-marketers and actually didn’t get to know Friedman until years later, when they owned nearby farms in Vermont.
Kevin Kosar: He was not a free-market kind of guy. He would never reduce human beings to homo economicus. He thought they were much more complicated and that they were much more local creatures. And religion, and religious background, and personal experiences — all that sort of stuff affected their behavior. And so while he could appreciate economics, he was not a devotee, that’s for sure.
Geoff Kabaservice: Before we get into Banfield’s writings, I should point out here that you’ve done a great service to scholarship, Kevin, by creating the website edwardcbanfield.org, which is an online compendium of works by and about Banfield, including PDFs of many of his books that are otherwise difficult or expensive to obtain.
Kevin Kosar: Right. Actually, and if I may offer a corrective (and you flagged me on it), it was Hayek’s work that he encountered. I still have a copy, that came down through my wife’s family, of Banfield’s copy of Hayek’s book on freedom. And that, I think, was quite illuminating to him because it fed into his thinking about how much can a government authority know versus the disparate knowledge that’s scattered out there in the population.
Geoff Kabaservice: Although in the ‘30s and even into the ‘40s, Banfield was still an advocate of government planning, in contradiction to Hayek’s view that government officials can never know enough of the data to actually formulate comprehensive plans. Is that correct?
Kevin Kosar: Yes. Banfield, as you noted, had the experience of working for the New Deal, and he was an ardent New Dealer. I’ve read his correspondence from some of those years, and he very much believed that government could achieve great things for the people. And his job as a public information officer was to excite the press about that work, to sell government to them. But it was his experience going out and visiting the government project, the farm at Casa Grande, that left him with this gnawing feeling that “Man, maybe I don’t have this quite right.” But his belief in a progressive, New-Dealist, centralized planning mindset and system of doing things — he carried that forward for part of his career in graduate school at the University of Chicago. He published articles, for example, in the American Political Science Review where he basically scowled at Congress and all these incompetent, partial, parochial individuals trying to create a budget, and he argued for revising the process to just minimize these people and instead shift the power over to more rational people who could identify the nation’s priorities as a whole and allocate resources accordingly.
Geoff Kabaservice: In 1951, Banfield published his doctoral dissertation as a book, Government Project. And if I may quote from the foreword you wrote for this 2024 edition that I have in my hand, you rhetorically asked why AEI would republish this long out-of-print book about a failed New Deal experiment. And you responded that “Government Project is a profound book that holds lessons for our present era, when the political left and right increasingly turn to the government to ameliorate America’s problems.” This is a book you’ve been thinking about a long time, because I remember that fifteen years ago you reviewed it for some obscure deep-state publication. And I also remember the AEI scholars used to pass around tattered copies of that 1951 edition as a talisman of sorts.
Kevin Kosar: Yes, I encountered Government Project probably close to twenty years ago, and it was a family copy, so I was very ginger with the way that I read it and didn’t put pencil to it or anything like that. And it blew my mind. It blew my mind because of the complexity of sources that Banfield drew upon. I mean, it’s just an astonishing piece of work. And I got excited about it. And the first thing I think I wrote was a review of it for Public Administration Review, where I basically said, “This is a lost classic.” At that time I was at CRS and I was doing a lot of studying of bureaucracy, so I was deeply steeped in the public-admin world. I was part of the Public Administration Society, and bless their hearts for taking my proposed idea of running an essay on this thing. And as the years went by, my interest in it deepened, and I just all the more felt like it was a shame that this book was just not available. Finding copies was extraordinarily difficult. So yeah, that’s one of the reasons I brought it back.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I’m grateful that you have. So just to set the table here, the Resettlement Administration and then the Farm Security Agency (its successor) sought to help destitute farm workers during the Depression, including by resettling migrants on farms and in government-created communities. And it was through Banfield’s work as a public information officer (as you said) for the FSA that he learned about the FSA’s Casa Grande Valley Farms in Pinal County, Arizona, which became the subject of his book Government Project. So tell me about what transpired at Casa Grande.
Kevin Kosar: The Great Depression was a bad time for everybody, but it was also a particularly bad time for farms. There was an invention, the diesel-powered tractor, a technological marvel which changed the game. And, of course, who could afford this new piece of technology? Well, it tended to be the wealthiest of the farmers. And this led to a sort of aggregation and creation of mega-farms owned by conglomerate-type entities, which was a very rapid process. And many small farmers just could not create the economies of scale and compete on price, and they couldn’t purchase seed at the rates that these bigger farms were able to purchase seed. And they started just going out of business. Family farms were dying left and right.
Rex Tugwell was very dismayed about this problem, and he was trying to figure a way to make farming work so it did not just become these giant corporations that were running farms. And his initial thought was: “Why don’t we buy up a bunch of land and just create midsize farms that we give to these various farmers? We’ll interview and find the people who are most competent and likely to be able to run these things well, and we’ll give them the support they need and subsidize them in various ways and see if we can get them through.” But the more he chewed it over with others, the more they realized that they couldn’t fight the economics fully. And so the next idea was: “What if we create our own mega farm? And we will bring people in to do the farming, and ultimately it will cooperate with one another, and it’ll be a shared enterprise, and the profits of it will flow to them. And this thing will be able to hold its own against these private corporate farms.”
And that’s what they set up. They went to a chunk of land where there was basically nothing, and they built an entire town, complete with modern homes better than the homes that many of the people who were drafted to live there had ever lived in. And they just created a community kind of ex nihilo.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m sure there will be some on the right who will ask: “Wait a second. So the United States created a counterpart to Stalin’s collective farms?”
Kevin Kosar: Absolutely. I mean, that’s what many critics at the time said, that this was an experiment in socialism and it reminded them of collectivism. You had people in Congress who were quite upset about it. But the key difference is that this was voluntary. People applied to come to this farm, they went through a screening process, and not everybody was accepted — unlike Mr. Stalin’s operations, where it was farm or die.
Geoff Kabaservice: It actually seems that this collective farm was, for a while, kind of a success.
Kevin Kosar: Yes. It was a heavily subsidized operation. The federal government in many ways was very directive of it. Despite setting it up as a cooperative, which in theory should be owned by the denizens of Casa Grande, the FSA (the government agency) kept a heavy hand in running things and also chose the very first manager of the place. And this is another interesting wrinkle of the Government Project book: the difference that leadership can make. This first fellow to run the place — he was a boss. He did not really want a lot of feedback from the people who worked there and lived there. He just kind of commanded people around and was intimidating in the process.
And that worked, and the farm did end up turning a profit and was doing pretty well. But it was always a little bit wobbly because the people there were not cohering as a community. The government had built a community center, just to cite one thing, that was notoriously underused because people were just not — they weren’t birds of a feather flocking together. They were people who were aggregated in the same chunk of land, and they just didn’t have a shared history or anything to bond themselves to one another, and so that factionalism was right there underneath the surface the whole time. And yes, once we saw a change in leadership and you had a more mild-mannered fellow running the place, things fell apart.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it seems to me that Banfield’s ultimate conclusion was that this farm essentially collapsed in 1944 and had to enter legal liquidation because its residents were unable to cooperate, because they were engaged in what he called “a ceaseless struggle for power.”
Kevin Kosar: Yes. If James Madison had been alive at the time, he would’ve looked at Casa Grande and said, “Yeah, no surprise. Factions are a part of human existence, and trying to control them and channel their energies is a great question of governance.” And the farm there just did not have the capacity to deal with the factionalism. Interestingly, the split in the community that existed was between those who were angry with the FSA and wanted the FSA to give more power to the people there, and the others who thought the FSA was doing a pretty good job and tended to support whomever was managing at the farm at the time.
Because this was set up as a cooperative, what that meant was that there were elections, and so people could run to be on the board of the cooperative. And so there became this competition to see who could get the majority of the seats, and it went back and forth in terms of control. I have to say with some amusement, I’ve lived in a cooperative apartment in Northwest DC for the last seventeen years, and my wife and her family have lived in cooperative apartments for many decades, and factionalist politics are just endemic to the enterprise. And trying to control them so the community is able to make shared decisions that play out well in the long term, it’s challenging. It is very challenging.
Geoff Kabaservice: And part of Banfield’s conclusion, if I’m reading him correctly, is that some cultures are better able to handle such factional disputes than others.
Kevin Kosar: Yes. Well, the cultural thing — and this is important for Banfield’s later work — the cultural thing was another source for rifts. You had some people who came to the co-op, to the Casa Grande, who had been maybe lower-middle class, maybe upper-lower class, maybe worked in a machine shop or previously owned their own small farm. And then there were those who came to work on the farm who were just destitute — what were often called Okies. These were people who had never lived with plumbing or those sorts of amenities. And so the community also split along the lines of “those lower-class people versus the rest of us,” and that us-and-them dynamic played out and followed the ability to cooperate together.
But none of these people had ever been prepared for this really complicated exercise where essentially you’re saying, “We’re going to set up a democracy, but it’s a democracy that applies to an economic enterprise.” And that’s even more complex than a residential cooperative, where yes, we have this asset, this apartment building, that we all have shares in, but we don’t make a living from this. These people on the farm, the money they had in their pocket was entirely a product of the place that they lived in together. And so the stakes could get really high in terms of what they wanted, how much people should get paid, what jobs should get done, all that sort of stuff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And some of the people who left the farm after it was dissolved walked away destitute and became migrant workers again. There’s that evocative quote from the worker Charles McCormick: “We not only killed the goose that laid the golden egg, we even threw the god-damn egg away.”
Kevin Kosar: Yes. That was, I think, really baffling to the FSA. You had these very well-intended folks who were trying to make these Americans’ lives better. And from a material standpoint, these folks had it better than they probably had ever had it. Again, you’ve got a brand new house with the most modern amenities; you’re not living in something that was built fifty years before and things were always breaking. You had a brand-new community, fresh roads. You had ready-made work. You had been given so much, and yet people ultimately — and it was a community decision — decided to shut the farm down and walk away. They just weren’t happy. And that was a huge lesson, and a shocking one.
Geoff Kabaservice: I had a line from your foreword to the book in mind yesterday. You wrote that this farm essentially failed because “the residents couldn’t form a cohesive community with mutual trust.” And as luck would have it, yesterday I was in an event at the Danish ambassador’s residence in Washington, which was largely a discussion about social communication and social trust. It was co-hosted by Philippa Hughes, who’s an amazing person whom I’ve had on the podcast before, and our mutual friend Mike Murphy, who’s the director of The FixUS network of democracy reformers and also is chief of staff for the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget. But I came away from that event feeling quite conflicted, because the Danish have probably the highest levels of trust of any society in the world: trust in other people, institutions, in authority. Whereas here in America, we have abysmal levels of trust in all of the above. But I don’t know that we can really transfer lessons from the Danish experience to this country because so much of their social and civic trust derives from their culture, which doesn’t strike me as particularly replicable.
Kevin Kosar: And part of any enterprise or organization is the question of authority. And authority is inevitably a kind of dialogic relationship, a shared understanding, and the context is going to greatly affect whether or not an individual is going to cooperate or not cooperate. So for example, let’s imagine that instead of signing up to work on a cooperative farm where these individuals were going to be owners and it was peddled to them as a kind of democracy of sorts, what if they had just been signed up to be civilians in the U.S. Army? You probably would not have had those factional politics break out because the understanding is leaders lead in the army, you obey. You don’t obey, you will be punished. And so people go in, they understand the relationship, and they’re probably going to behave very differently than if you put them someplace else and say, “Yeah, you’re here. It’s the federal government, however the shared understanding is that to some degree you are an owner.”
Getting back to Banfield being the sociologist, that was one of the really neat things about Government Project. He was able to get in there and see how the farm structure created cognitive confusion. People could not clarify their context. And when you can’t clarify your context, you can behave in ways that appear to be irrational, and you can act up because you just don’t know your place; you don’t know where you fit in and what role you are to play. And he quotes Durkheim and gets deep into this thing, but it was really, I think, spot on. You could feel that these people were just confused as to what the heck they were doing out there. And it’s no wonder.
Geoff Kabaservice: Wilson, in his biographical essay on Banfield, did say that he thought that book Government Project was critical to Banfield’s intellectual development, because he really focused in on that central question: How can people be induced to cooperate? And, Wilson continued, since some degree of cooperation is essential for any society, the larger question is: How can a decent society be sustained? He also said that Government Project surfaced Banfield’s increasing doubts about the efficacy of government planning.
Kevin Kosar: Yes. On the matter of cooperation… Humans need to cooperate. We can’t flourish unless we cooperate. The question is, what’s the means for doing it? Is it governmental action and direction? Is it markets? Is it voluntary associations, be they religious or otherwise? Those are your three big choices, and different cooperative activities are better befitting of different ones of those — and figuring that out is really an essential thing. But on government, what Banfield found was that getting people to cooperate through government action requires people to plan. And that means you’re going to only have a handful of people who really are making the decisions, and how much can they know? How much are they even in agreement with one another? Like in the book, you see the different people at the FSA just have different ideas about how this project is supposed to work out. And this is just one small, discrete project, not an entire policy issue, policy area.
And confusion is endemic because you’re ultimately taking human beings who have their own worldviews and trying to get them on the same page. Banfield didn’t use the word coaching — I don’t think he probably thought much about sports at that time — but that’s kind of what he was getting at, the ability to create coordination by having a plan and having everybody understand the plan and feel incentivized to follow the plan. But that’s what it takes for government action to work, and that’s just no easy thing.
Geoff Kabaservice: In 1951, when he wrote the book, Banfield hadn’t given up entirely on the planning effort, but he did make the observation that there was this real disjunction between the well-meaning and efficient and non-corrupt planners and then their intended beneficiaries, who didn’t understand the planners’ designs, didn’t agree with them, and ultimately were not willing or able to embrace them. And this actually fits into a theme that I’ve surfaced a lot on this podcast with writers like Jennifer Pahlka or Greg Berman or Aubrey Fox, which is that policymakers need to better understand what actually happens at ground level and how much policymaking really comes down to implementation.
Kevin Kosar: Oh, absolutely. Yes, the gulf between what policymakers think is wrong and how it may be fixed versus those who are in the plight they’re attempting to remedy — it could often be quite profound. And Banfield also pointed out and developed more thoroughly in some of his other works: Planning does not occur in the abstract. Not only do you have particular human beings who are engaged in it, but typically they’re in a political context. If they’re in the executive branch, they have to worry about what the president thinks, what the head of the department thinks. They have to worry about what Congress thinks. And the planning process is inevitably going to be influenced by those considerations one way or another. And you’ve got to be mindful of that, because what it can lead to is well-intended planners dealing with political forces bumping up against them, ultimately coming up with a plan that’s not going to work.
And that’s one of the reasons, as you’ve quoted, that Banfield became very skeptical about government’s ability to tackle the really hard problems. To be clear, if you’d asked Banfield, “Can government build a bridge?” He would say, yes, they could do it quite well. But when it comes to something more complicated, like how do you ameliorate or eliminate poverty? That’s a whole different ball of wax. And government’s ability to do that, I think we’ve seen over time, has been very hit or miss.
Geoff Kabaservice: We don’t have time, unfortunately, to get into some of Banfield’s writings on city government, but it does seem that through that work he became very skeptical of experts as compared to politicians — because the politicians actually were the ones who could reach compromise. They knew about differences of opinion. They knew how those differences of opinion could reflect fundamental disagreement about how these government programs would be received. And they, in that sense, were closer to the ground on the questions of implementation than the planners.
Kevin Kosar: Absolutely, and their work inevitably is going to be more patchwork than precise planning, but yes, it will absolutely be more in tune with the wants and needs. And yeah, Ed was a big fan of politicians. I mean, he liked guys like Richard Daley because he thought that they kept communities together. They fed the factions, kept them happy enough that they didn’t take to the streets, and ultimately sometimes got them to cooperate for collective action for the betterment of society. But the politics that are created by our American system of government just inevitably are there, and inevitably make it so the delivery of a public good or public service almost always is going to fall a little bit short.
Geoff Kabaservice: On this question of cooperation for collective action… Not long after the publication of Government Project, Banfield and his family went to the small, Mormon-dominated town of Gunlock, Utah, which is in this harsh desert area in the southwestern corner of the state. And he wrote a manuscript about this community but he never published it. Do you know why?
Kevin Kosar: He was just never quite satisfied with it. And then he moved on to visiting a community in Italy, and — with the help of his wife, who was Italian and could speak the language — produced the book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. I wish the Mormon book had been published, because it and The Moral Basis are kind of bookends of sorts. He was astonished at the capacity of Mormons to cooperate for the collective good and how, under the toughest conditions — and being pariahs, in many ways, to the rest of America — they’d succeeded marvelously. Meanwhile, you look at the folks he studied in the village in Italy, and individuals there just didn’t trust anyone outside of their immediate family. And as a result, they couldn’t do collective action. They were poor, their government was hapless, and they were all riven with distrust.
Geoff Kabaservice: The town in question was Chiaromonte in southern Italy. He pseudonymed the town as Montegrano. And as you say, this became the basis of his 1958 book that he wrote with the help of his wife, entitled The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. And this book is widely considered to be one of the classics of 20th-century social science. Why is that?
Kevin Kosar: Part of it is the counter-intuitiveness of it. And this is where Banfield could be a bit of an imp. I mean, we all say you should love your family, you should be devoted to your family, you should take care of your family. Family first! Well, Banfield showed, as Aristotle did before, that too much of a good thing could be a bad thing and that these cultural attitudes that they had affected their prosperity, affected their well-being. And any effort to try to help the people of Montegrano, as he pseudonymed it, was not likely to succeed, because if you don’t have trust, you’re not going to believe anything that’s being put in front of you. You’re going to resist it. It’s kind of a trap, a self-defeating trap.
And this was something that furthered along his entire thinking about culture, and particularly his division of lower-class culture versus middle- or upper-class culture. That lower-class culture was a worldview that set you up to lose because it didn’t channel you towards activities that only pay off in the long run: like staying in school and learning stuff even if you don’t like the stuff you’re being taught, like following laws even if you think they’re stupid, like deferring your own desire to own something if you can’t afford it by not stealing it from somebody else. So yeah, it was a great book, and I don’t think anybody had actually done anything like that until he did it.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the argument there is actually similar in a way to the argument in Government Project, which is that the difference among communities is culture; it’s not really money, it’s not leadership, it’s not planning. I mean, the Mormon community that he visited was also not materially well off, but it was a place where people cooperated. They were industrious, they contributed to the church, they formed volunteer organizations, they campaigned for local improvements. In this pseudonymed town of Montegrano, on the other hand, these people didn’t have social capital. They didn’t work for the common good. They had these material, short-term interests in their nuclear family, and they assumed that nobody else was realistically going to give up anything of their own family interest for the common good. And this is why he called it “amoral familism.”
Kevin Kosar: Yes, even when somebody tries to do something nice or helpful to someone else, there was this feeling of, “What are you trying to put over on me?” It’s hard to foment more good behavior if, when somebody does good, they are met with skepticism, the sotto voce accusation of they’re up to mischief and that they don’t really have good motives.
Geoff Kabaservice: I must say that on this axis of cooperation versus individualism, collective idealism versus individual cynicism, it honestly feels like we in the United States are a lot closer to the Chiaramonte example than we are to the Gunlock example at the moment.
Kevin Kosar: Certainly, in certain places. Some communities are healthier and more cohesive, and other places are a mess. I mean, we still have slums which are quite violent, where people don’t trust each other and express their distrust through violence. We have Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where you have members of Congress who have intense distrust for one another, which makes it very, very challenging for them to act cooperatively. So yeah, it’s a thing.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. And you have pointed this out to me in the past, but Congress actually used to be a community when members of Congress lived here. Nowadays they come in three days a week, and in the rest of the time (and even during) they just sling insults at each other and don’t even get to know each other as people, which might make them a little more reluctant to insult each other.
Kevin Kosar: Capitol Hill used to be a community. There was a long period of time when many members lived in boarding houses, and so you’d share a restroom with somebody who was on your floor who also worked in Congress. You were under the same roof. You took your meals in the same place. And then, once we got past that period of time, there was a good stretch of the 20th century where we didn’t have easy airplane access to and from Washington. And so when members got elected, they came here. They brought their families, the kids enrolled in the same schools frequently. They hung out together after work, they drank in the Capitol together. They cohered into a community where they knew one another, so even when you had to say unpleasant things about the other political side, the other side knew that you didn’t really hate them; you were just politicking and doing what you had to. And now, members just don’t hang around with one another nearly enough. They don’t have the time for it, even when they’re here. And as a result, it’s very atomized.
Geoff Kabaservice: And certainly, your work on Congress’ legislative capacity surfaced some of these issues as well. So let’s talk about that book you threw across your subway car, The Unheavenly City, which Banfield published in 1970 and then republished in a somewhat revised form four years later as The Unheavenly City Revisited. Like you were saying, it’s actually a little bit depressing in the sense that he’s saying that there are serious problems in the cities, but they’re pretty much insoluble — now and for the foreseeable future. And he wrote that “in so far as it has opened to government, federal, state, and local to affect the situation, it tends to behave perversely, that is, not to do the things that would make it better, but instead to do those that will make it worse.”
He wrote that “Government can neither change fundamentally the pattern of metropolitan growth and neither can it solve any of the serious problems associated with it. To be specific, it cannot eliminate slums, educate the slum child, train the unskilled worker, end chronic poverty, stop crime and delinquency, or prevent riots.” And this was, in his view, because culture — which to a large extent he saw as rooted in the individual and the family structure — “plays a more important role than discrimination, lack of education, or even poverty in impeding a person’s economic progress.”
Kevin Kosar: The Unheavenly City was really kind of a culmination of his years of studying cities. He studied Chicago very, very closely. He studied Boston. It was one major metropolitan area after another, often with the help of Jim Wilson, sometimes with the help of Martha Derthick — who became a great scholar in her own right. And what Banfield saw was that you had a lot of highly educated, often university-based or foundation-based individuals who had a planner’s worldview of dealing with cities. And so they looked at cities, and they saw cities as dirty places, tumultuous places, segregated places. They didn’t like the housing stock. And so they rolled up their arms and decided that they were going to find ways to use federal power to fix all these problems.
One of Banfield’s early case studies was the book Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest. And the title expresses his thesis: politics is the basis for cooperative government action, that planning rests the top, and the public interest might be achieved to varying degrees, although whether there truly is a public interest is an idea he interrogated deeply. He thought that there were a lot of publics and there were a lot of different interests, and that pluralism meant that there were no easy answers to the question of what’s in the public interest.
But yes, The Unheavenly City infuriated people because he wrote it largely as a response to this almost hegemonic movement of planners and super-smart people who had the ears of the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration, and who were saying, “We just need to pour money in and to make plans and fix things.”
Banfield was aghast, for example, at what he saw occurring with urban renewal, this idea that we’re going to get rid of these slums, these inadequate buildings, and we’re going to build communities anew. What he saw was that these efforts came to disaster, and that you ended up with people being moved from central city locations, once their buildings were wrecked, out to the sticks, out to the edge of the city, and then that their numbers were concentrated so that instead of having them live around more middle-class, upper-class people who they might potentially emulate, you had segregated them in these high-rises that were often mismanaged. And you couldn’t have things like street police patrols. All those intricate relationships that people had in their day-to-day lives, even when they were living in the slums and not necessarily doing well — those were taken away because of the planning and the planners’ inability to see those sorts of things. So yes, The Unheavenly City was very much a plea for modesty in expectations in government action.
Geoff Kabaservice: Banfield was really arguing against the efficacy of the War on Poverty, the Great Society, even the minimum wage. Were there attempts to, as we would say now, cancel Banfield from the left?
Kevin Kosar: Oh yeah. I don’t know if he was the first professor canceled, but he was certainly — I’m not overstating it — terrorized by radicals, radical students in particular. Interestingly, he didn’t just write The Unheavenly City cloistered away. He was actually drafting chapters and taking them to his classes, and reading them out aloud, distributing them, and asking students to tear apart his work and explain it. And so he had this whole collaborative arrangement with the students. But once the book came out, and it got excerpts in the Wall Street Journal and excerpts in New York magazine, and it was published by Little, Brown — a trade publisher, not an academic press. And so it was a big deal, and it resulted in a big bullet-target being put on him.
Radicals started to show up and disrupt his classes at Harvard, harass him outside the buildings. When he gave guest lectures at places, students stormed in and would shut the program down before it could even get started. Banfield was so besieged that he actually moved to the University of Pennsylvania. He had one woman who was just an absolute stalker, and he tried to escape her, and she followed him to UPenn and enrolled as a student there after being thrown out of Harvard. And then Banfield fled back to Harvard because UPenn couldn’t protect him from the predations. So yeah, it was rough for him after The Unheavenly City.
Geoff Kabaservice: A lot of the criticism that was leveled against him was that he was being racist, that he was singling out African Americans and particularly black men — essentially race-based criticism. Whereas it seems from not even a close reading, a pretty obvious reading, his view is entirely different. He doesn’t deny racism, but he’s just saying that it’s class that’s the main determinant of poverty. And it’s largely based, as you were saying earlier, in a person’s attitude toward time and their time horizon.
Kevin Kosar: Where he came down to it was that when you’re focusing on problems like crime or poverty, in many ways these problems are the output of individual behaviors — and that means fixing those problems means changing the individual. And he was just very skeptical that a government program could change an individual. He recognized that, sure, government can do things to create more opportunities. But for a person who just doesn’t care about the opportunities being created, that’s not going to move the ball forward; that’s not going to improve people’s lives.
And he just felt that the people doing the planning were missing that fundamental truth — that you could set the table, but you can’t force somebody to sit and eat what’s provided. And that was just not a welcome message because, at that time, there was a lot of belief that the reason you had poverty and riots was just a lack of opportunity — often a lack of opportunity caused by the Man, be it the corporate man who wants to hold people down or the racist man who wants to hold people down. And so people of that mindset who even bothered to read some of Banfield just figured he was being a mouthpiece for the status quo. And that offended their sensibilities, so they attacked him and accused him of classism and racism and being a private sympathizer with dictators and all sorts of nuts stuff.
Geoff Kabaservice: I noticed you linked to the New York Review of Books review “Survival of the Fattest.”
Kevin Kosar: Yes, young Richard Sennett — who’s not young Richard Sennett anymore. A classic thing: you’re a young academic and you want to make your chops, so you take a punch at the biggest name in your field at the time. And yeah, that was a nasty book review and totally unfair.
Geoff Kabaservice: Banfield died in 1999, which is about a year before what we would call the urban revival really started. To what extent do you think Banfield would look at what has happened positively in cities since 2000 and say that any of it was due to government action?
Kevin Kosar: I think he may have taken some interest in the policing reforms, particularly the stuff that had been rolled out in New York City. But I think he largely would’ve pointed to this being a natural rhythm of the city, that economics and other factors have a great deal with whether or not a city is particularly prosperous or is sliding downhill. If you build a bunch of roads near a city, don’t be surprised if people in the city use them to leave the city. If, on the other hand, you build a good metropolitan transit system, well, you may have more people hanging around because they find that to be a real amenity.
I think he was very much a believer in leadership. One of the things that he did in Government Project was to cite the public admin thinker Chester Barnard, who almost had a Thomas Hobbesian sort of conception of what leaders do. They create a shared understanding of what a community is about and where one’s place is in that, and what goals you are moving towards, and project the confidence and strength that this is how you’re going to get there.
And New York City, for example… Rudy Giuliani back in the day was a strong leader. Was he a little flaky at places? Yeah, sure he was. But compared to David Dinkins, who frequently seemed very overwhelmed and it was very hard to have great confidence in him, or going back further, some of the other mayors who just seemed at sea — all the way back to John Lindsay, just unable to handle the forces about them… People lose confidence. Things get out of control.
So yes, I don’t think Banfield would have been surprised. I think he would have been dismayed at the current state of some of the big cities. Some of his basic insights about public order and other things have just been forgotten, and the same mistakes are being made over. He probably would have rolled his eyes and shaken his head, that this is the way of humankind. We learn, then we forget.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as a final question, Kevin, what strike you as the most relevant elements of Banfield’s overall critique today?
Kevin Kosar: Well, certainly I brought out the book in part because I was concerned that there are many folks on the right today who are becoming enamored of government action, who think that big government conservatism is a thing we should do, and we can achieve our goals and we can impose our solutions on the rest of society who aren’t conservatives. There’s a lot of talk around that, a lot of advocacy of that, and we’ve seen it with the rise of Trump. The possibility of those sorts of things happening is becoming more and more real. And it’s troubling to me because it’s a forgetting of the limits of government. Government’s wonderful, but it’s only wonderful at certain things. And when you try to make it do things that it’s just not built to do, when you imagine that you can just plan and force solutions on society, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. And you’re also going to create even more public cynicism because your promises, which are lofty, are not going to be delivered upon. And that’s just a waste of money, and it’s just bad for the country.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well put. Well, Kevin Kosar, thank you again for joining me today, and congratulations and thank you for bringing Edward Banfield’s 1951 classic Government Project back into publication and existence.
Kevin Kosar: Geoff, thanks for having me on, and I hope listeners out there will get a copy and let me know what they think about it.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.